Report

Love them or hate them, in-app purchases look here to stay. According to a report from Distimo, in-app purchases now account for a staggering 76% of App Store revenue as of February 2013. This has seen a huge increase since January 2012, where in-app purchases accounted for just 53% of revenue.

One of the more interesting conversations the Smartphone Experts team had at CES 2010 was with Root Wireless, who monitors the performance of Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, and T-Mobile in the US. Their overall message is that there's no single best carrier, because it varies so much from place to place, but they did try to determine which carrier survived CES the best.

Here's the bottom line:

AT&T started out providing the fastest service, but quickly fell to 4th place.

Verizon better maintained its consistency of service, performing particularly well on the event’s busiest days.

Loading its proprietary Root Mobile™ crowdsourcing application on smartphones purchased off-the-shelf from each of the ‘Big Four’ carriers, Root Wireless conducted stationary tests at a fixed location immediately adjacent to the Las Vegas Convention Center, constantly running Root Mobile from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., January 5-8. The linear tests determine data transmissions speeds, cell tower hand-off rates and network connection failures, as monitored and reported by Root Mobile. It is noteworthy that the findings differ from others data transmission speed tests conducted using PCs, precisely because Root Mobile is engineered to determine wireless consumers’ real-world experience using smartphones, not PCs. Also worth keeping in mind: Results reported here are local to the Las Vegas Convention Center. Root Wireless network mapping software has confirmed that all network performance is local; it varies from neighborhood-to-neighborhood, from service provider to service provider.

CrackBerry Kevin shot from video at Root Wireless' booth, so if you're curious for more (and the techies among you should be!) go check that out on CrackBerry.com.